Gear setups for multi specs; how do you manage it?

Hi everyone, I've recently returned to WoW and decided to reroll Rogue. Hit 90 about a week ago, geared up as Combat and starting normals tomorrow.

My question is, with the rather large differences between stat priorities between Combat and Assassination, how does one go about managing their gear? Knowing that Assassination is better ST and Combat is far better aoe (til 5.2 I hear) do top rogues merely choose to gear for one spec and just slide by with that gear in their OS? Do top rogues regem and reforgelite for every boss that differentiates? I hope this makes sense, as the class I played prior only had to manage one set of gear! Thanks in advance!

If you want to spend 1000s of gold for regemming for every fight be my guest. As a JC i will appreciate people like you getting me more business. As for the obvious answer, you focus on your main spec gear and don't reforge regem every single fight since this will mean wasting time porting to town and back every time you switch. The stat weights differ but not every difference matters that much in an aoe situation since most stat weights are based on single target sims. Also in most bossfights you will have mainly single target dps so maximazing that is a priority and focusing down adds in aoe is something you can sort of do on the side (you can respec cause that takes no time and effort and doesn't cost anything), if a fight is really aoe heavy, but aside from that i personally wouldn't bother farming a second set of gear or regem reforge all the time.

Yes the reforge order is different, but considering the two extremes of haste and mastery:
Assa 1000 points of haste yields 912 dps, 1000 points of mastery 1008. The dps difference for reforging 1000 points "the wrong way" is 96dps on single targets (it is propably higher with aoe packs).

Combat gets 1459 dps from 1000 points of haste and 1272 dps from mastery. Difference is 187 dps if reforged the wrong way...

Given the amount of secondary stats, i can reforge a little bit over 3000 stat points from haste to mastery or vice versa. Say with higher gear you have 5k stat points to reforge... the result is ~500-1000 dps on single target fights with the worst reforge strategy.

Because most of the fights i like to be assa, i reforge for assa and have good results for the few fights with useful usage of cleave.

Hey b4d, thanks for the reply. As a JC myself I understand how expensive it would be to regem every fight I was more aiming towards that kind of scenario while on progression. While I knew it wouldn't be realistic to do so, I was basically fishing for whats the best to focus on, and you mostly answered that: Assassination. It makes sense that that would be the first line of gearing as it would be used the most, but looking at WOL I do see quite a few Combat rogues logged out in Combat gear... I guess I'm just really confused on how one chooses their main/OS.

Originally Posted by Hyrican

You forget the real difference between secondary stats is smaller...
..snip

Thats something I was looking for, thanks Hyrican. I was guessing this was the situation, I was just really confused after browsing WoL seeing a lot of high combat rogues logged out in combat gear, and the same for assassination logs, logged out in assassination gear...

Mainly I was worried about, as new to this class, a situation while progressing of "WTF are you playing Assassin and sitting here in combat gear?!"

Before we start, quick couple of notes:
It is always possible and nearly always optimal to gather two sets of gear, reforging each for whichever situation you need. This used to be common place a few years back, but seems to have died down lately - probably due to the vast switch to 10 man raiding which drops less gear.

Assassination is better in single target and aoe, currently combat's niche is purely cleaving. I haven't seen testing done in the ptr yet to know how this will change in 5.2.

Top rogues will probably reforge and gem for each specific encounter if it's warranted, whether that should concern you is a far different matter.

---

So, as said above, combat's min/max role this tier is cleave. This means, if you're trying to push out the best useful numbers for your guild, you'll rock assassination and use combat during fights like Stone Dogs and Garalon. Since you'll only be cleaving when you play combat, stat priorities are slightly different. You should find that scale factors "squish" together a bit more, not a lot, but enough.

Because of this, and as Hyrican points, maintaining correct reforges are less important. A lot of rogues notice this, and you'll find that many play combat in assassination reforges as the difference is simply not that large.

Yes the reforge order is different, but considering the two extremes of haste and mastery:
Assa 1000 points of haste yields 912 dps, 1000 points of mastery 1008. The dps difference for reforging 1000 points "the wrong way" is 96dps on single targets (it is propably higher with aoe packs).

Combat gets 1459 dps from 1000 points of haste and 1272 dps from mastery. Difference is 187 dps if reforged the wrong way...

Given the amount of secondary stats, i can reforge a little bit over 3000 stat points from haste to mastery or vice versa. Say with higher gear you have 5k stat points to reforge... the result is ~500-1000 dps on single target fights with the worst reforge strategy.

Because most of the fights i like to be assa, i reforge for assa and have good results for the few fights with useful usage of cleave.

If this information is correct it is sticky worthy for those who are worried about 2 sets of gear.

not sticky worthy due to the changes to stat weights with gear scaling. Ex.: my current priority for assassin is agi>mast>haste>crit at 509 ilvl. So don't take those stat weights to be true for your set of gear.

well i dont regem if i switch from combat to assassination and i dont feel like im losing dps if i would be regemming every fight i have to switch i would be broke by now i use mainly assassination gems (oragne one with mastery) ihave 3 yellow sokets everything else is pure agi or soket bonus hit agi

the ultimate answer's to all rogue issues :

-Rogues might still be dealing with the changes to combo points {2014}

In the DS tier, I would switch from Sub to Combat with the same gear (reforged for Sub). I tried adjusting the reforges the other way around and the difference was small.

This tier, combat only seemed better for the Guardians fight, so again I did that in my assassination gear. I was still getting tons of cleave damage so it made more sense to use. I think it really comes down to how top end you want to be. For my guild's progress and play style, that type of effort wouldn't make a whole bunch of sense.

not sticky worthy due to the changes to stat weights with gear scaling. Ex.: my current priority for assassin is agi>mast>haste>crit at 509 ilvl. So don't take those stat weights to be true for your set of gear.

Expertise capping is a must for me. Having a Blindside dodged is a massive dps loss for me. I hate it.

---------- Post added 2013-02-11 at 03:43 PM ----------

Originally Posted by RogueOlf

This tier, combat only seemed better for the Guardians fight, so again I did that in my assassination gear. .

Agree. Combat is literally only best for this fight. It is not best at all for Garalon or Amber Shaper (the other fights quoted by Combat rogues), unless you are pretty much the only melee. We are not farming MGV any more so I dont even have a Combat spec.

BTW, using Mastery gems and reforged for Sub works well. Due to Energetic Recovery and HAT, Sub has really good energy regen, and the Mastery is really nice for passive damage and finishers.

You should also remember that stat weights scale differently when we're talking about cleaving.

If you're serious enough to want to switch reforges and gems when you're switching specs, I'm guessing you're actually choosing the most appropriate spec for each encounter as well (which matters far more), which would be Assassination on single target and AoE (which has Mastery as the dominant stat) and Combat for cleaving.

What's nice, however, is that on cleave fights (Dogs, Garalon and Amber-Shaper this tier), high blade flurry uptime makes mastery pull really close to Haste, which negates the problem even further. The different for a full reforge+gear change on a 100% blade flurry uptime fight is, at my gearlevel (507 itemlevel), around 1.5k on a total of 171.5k, which makes it less than 1%.

What you may do, if you're really concerned about it, is getting different pieces to avoid having to regem/reforge every time, it's not like shads are worth that much currently anyways.

Well i obviously did a little napkin math with my stat scaling. As others pointed out, scalings differ with ilvl, set bonuses, style of fights.

The generalization of my post though is a reforge of 3-4k stat points in the wrong direction has an impact well below 10k dps (mostly around 1k dps only, but i was generous if one stat would hugely inflate in one specific situation) with current and near future itemlevels.

Expertise capping is a must for me. Having a Blindside dodged is a massive dps loss for me. I hate it.

This may be a little pedantic, but I'm relatively certain that the people who have done the math behind reforging/regemming calculations on EJ and in Shadowcraft have taken getting a Blindside dodged every so often.

That being said, from a gameplay/fun/dps "flow" factor, getting a Blindside proc dodged/parried is like hitting a brick wall going 60mph, and I hate it too. :P

Originally Posted by Lightfist

The truth of the matter is, you have no proof for this and are just generating facts.

Mastery is better for combat cleave, and that's the only reason I used the spec. So mut and combat cleave's stats lined up except that exp is vital for combat and not for mut. I just left my exp under cap since I was fairly close to cap the entire tier.

Aside from that, reforging is not a massive dps boost outside of hit/exp capping. It doesn't really matter unless that 1-5k DPS is necessary to net a kill. Considering RNG can easily account for that DPS difference, it's not a big deal.

I still don't know what I'll be running next tier, but personal testing has all specs really close.

OR- you can choose "hybrid weights". For instance, if you cap hit and expertise, and then assume mastery > haste > crit, you won't be in terrible shape. It will NOT be optimal- for most mutilate, crit narrowly will edge haste, and you don't need to cap expertise, for combat haste tops all, etc.- but you won't be so far off as to be shocking.